Bringing the truth to light

Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow

Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow was born on July 11, 1985 and adopted by actress Mia Farrow two weeks later. Like many of Mia Farrow’s 14 children, she has had multiple names during her childhood and for periods of time was also known as Eliza and Malone. In December 1991, Dylan and her brother Moses were co-adopted by Woody Allen. Dylan appeared in three of Woody Allen’s films before the age of five.

Big believers in psychoanalysis, Farrow and Allen took Dylan to see Dr. Susan Coates, a New York psychologist, from a very early age. Following Dr. Coates’ evaluation of Dylan in 1990, when she was five years old, Dr. Coates reported that the girl “would be taken over by fantasy” when asked to describe something as simple as an apple tree.

Two years later, when Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow was seven years old, she along with her two brothers found themselves at the center of a very heated custody battle between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. All of children were acutely aware of the anger and hurt Allen had caused Mia Farrow by having an affair with Soon-Yi Previn. Many of the children, including Dylan, witnessed Farrow’s frequent fits of rage.

On August 5, 1992, Mia Farrow alleged that Woody Allen had molested Dylan O’Sullivan Farrow the previous day when he visited his children in her Connecticut home. However, when asked by the pediatrician to point where Allen touched her, Dylan pointed to her shoulder. Her recounting of what happened on August 4, 1992 would continue to change many more times.

The accusation was thoroughly investigated by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital which interviewed Dylan Farrow nine times. Dr. John M. Leventhal, the doctor who headed the Connecticut investigation, concluded that either “these were statements that were made by an emotionally disturbed child and then became fixed in her mind [or] she was coached or influenced by her mother. We did not come to a firm conclusion. We think that it was probably a combination.” The New York State Department of Social Services came to a similar conclusion on October 26, 1993 when it closed its 14-month old investigation because “no credible evidence was found that the child named in this report has been abused or maltreated.”

Yet, Dylan Farrow has continued to allege that she was molested by Woody Allen. Her brother Moses, who was 14 at the time of the alleged incident, said he was at the Connecticut home with Allen, Dylan and his other siblings that day. He is certain that it never occurred, but believes that Dylan does as a result of their mother’s relentless coaching during those summer months in 1992.